Return
by hell-whim
Summary: The Ishvalan War of Extermination is the end of many things, and they are no exception. [FMA:B, Royai, prequel to Understanding and Clandestine]


**Title:** Return  
**Summary:** The Ishvalan War of Extermination is the end of many things, and they are no exception. [FMA:B, Royai]  
**Notes:** Prequel to Understanding and Clandestine.

* * *

**Return**

There isn't even a puff of wind to rattle the tent posts. They sit across from each other, consumed by the silence. Roy stares sightlessly at the ground, but Riza can't look away from his hands, clasped loosely between his knees.

She has seen those hands in many contexts: chalk-dusted from practicing transmutation circles, chapped red from the winter cold, callused from the ax's rough handle. She knows their touch as well—gripped tight to balance on the fence rail, held gently to step out of a car, softly curled inward to shield a burn.

"Y—"

Something is caught in his throat. He swallows it and starts again.

"You'll want it to look like an accident. Lantern too close to an ammo dump. Grenades, phosphorous, tar. Something like that."

"Phosphorous," Riza says. They glance up at the same time—their eyes meet, and they both snap away. "They, um, they gave us some signal grenades. Glass casing. We weren't supposed to carry them in our packs, but..."

"Right, yeah. That'll work. I'll have to burn deep to—to make it look like..."

He chokes again, and again she looks up. His hands now cover his face, white at the knuckles and shaking.

"Please," he whispers brokenly. "Please don't make me—"

But she knows he doesn't mean it. He makes a promise, and he keeps it. A matter of acceptance—she has time to wait. It's not as though they don't both have the time now.

"It would be easier," Riza says, after a few more minutes of silence—she wants to give him the chance to compose himself, and Roy is watching her through his still fingers, "if you weren't a good man. If you'd been arrogant, or taken advantage of me, or if you'd just killed and never cared. But that's not what you are."

"What am I, then?"

But she can't answer that, even for herself.

She stands and extinguishes the lamp—this part of the field base has been long abandoned, but someone might see the glow from a distance. If they're interrupted, she thinks, neither will be brave enough to try again.

For a moment, she stands staring into the dead lamp—waiting for the afterimage to fade, waiting for her breathing to level out, waiting for Roy to make a move. She hears—and sees, at the dim edge of her line-of-sight—as he scrubs his hands down his face. The desert dust smudges his features, and she can imagine how it must obscure hers as well.

"Sit," he says, and then amends the order: "Please."

But she doesn't—she stands in front of him, waiting until he looks up and meets her eyes. The overcoat is first, tossed behind into the dirt. Then the jacket—all that's left of the first ill-fitting set of BDUs she'd arrived with, fabric thin at the shoulders and elbows but still holding. Sidearm holster and bracers next, left hanging down past her hips.

She sets her fingers on the hem of her shirt—he sucks in a sharp breath but doesn't stop her, as she pulls the fabric slowly up. Then the final piece—peeling off her binding undergarment—and his head snaps away at the last second. Even in this semidarkness, she can see the flush creeping up his neck.

It's reflex to touch her own skin, to skate her fingers from her hips up across the so-soft curves of her breasts.

"I—"

He coughs, and his hands have clenched into fists.

"I won't have to—to burn all of it. There's a few key parts that would—that would make the rest impossible to solve."

With a shiver—not from chill—she sits at the edge of the cot, faced away from him but close enough that she can feel the shift of air when he moves.

"There," he whispers, and his finger is calloused and cool against the dip of her left shoulder blade. "And along here."

A second finger is added, and both drag slowly across her back to the other shoulder

"This was the hardest for me to figure," he says, his voice both low and close enough that she can feel the air that escapes with each parting of his lips. "Took a hell of a steady hand to etch it all."

There is heat where his hands have been: a pleasant, enveloping warmth—a closeness for which she has no other point of reference. No one else has ever touched this part of her.

"It was cruel of him to do this to you. To burden you with it."

"It was a choice I made."

"Nothing in that house was ever your choice," Roy says with that cutting edge of bitterness.

She turns her head to look back at him, over her own shoulder, arms limp at either side, and he is much closer than she had thought, his face only inches from hers, his mouth and lips on level with the curve of her neck. His hand has stilled, palm flattened against the dip of her spine, and his eyes are darker than she's ever seen. He holds her gaze and breathes slow.

"Do you really want to talk right now?" she whispers.

She had daydreamed once about kissing him—thirteen years old, watching from her bedroom window as he trudged up the drive, broad shoulders straining the worn fabric of his shirt. To her, he was perfect: older, handsome, inaccessible. An impression, an ideal—but not complete, not a real person.

He is even older now, and _real_, and accessible, and one of his hands cups the side of her face, fingers splayed around her ear, pulling her against the imperfect seal of his lips. His other hand stays clenched in his lap, and she sets both of her hands on his shoulders, twisting her body around to reach.

His clothes fall away in the same pattern as hers: overcoat and jacket and bracers and shirt, until bare skin touches bare skin. The cot is narrow, but she lies down, breaking the kiss, her hands drifting down his arms. He's pulled back, and she's afraid that he'll say something, that he'll stop, that he'll run away from this.

Instead, Roy kisses her: lips, jaw, neck, shoulder, breasts, stomach, hips. He fumbles with her belt and buttons and zipper, and then gives a little chuckle when he remembers her boots.

Lace by lace, back and forth, tugging the stiff leather from her heels—Riza rests on her elbows, watching him work, lifting her hips when he slides her trousers off. Then he sits at the end of the cot, hands working his own boots now, gaze flitting up and down the length of her. She wants to blush, to hide from such exposure, but she watches the dim sweep of his every movement, and she opens her mouth, and she speaks.

"No one's ever seen me like this."

He pauses, bare-footed.

"You mean you haven't...?"

"Oh, no, I have. There were boys at the academy. Just not a lot of time."

She smiles.

"Or privacy."

"I remember that."

His hand rests on her knee, and she can see him drifting. They both remember—a lot, too much, enough—but that's not what this is about. She sits up and takes his face between her hands.

"Don't go," she says. "Come back. Come back to me."

And she kisses him, softly—and she's daydreamed about this, too, her hands on the nape of his neck and threading through his hair, and the reality of it is both less and more than her childish fantasy. He's slow to respond, always a half-touch behind, lips parting timidly beneath hers. She makes short work of the last barrier between them.

Part of her wishes his hesitation would melt away, but she forces herself to match his pace, to dance her fingers along the sharp ridge of muscle in his back, the dip and curve of skin at each joint. She is not sacrilegious enough to think of it as worship—she is comparing and contrasting expectation to new reality. She commits to memory the heft of his hand beneath her knee, the scrape of his hip against her thigh, the taste of his mouth and the sharp smell of his sweat-damp hair.

There is a break, when he enters her: the kiss ends, and they stare at each other in this new silence, eyes wide. She can see clearly—from this beautiful, terrifying, intimate new distance—the exact shape and color of his irises, the soft flecks of blue along the edge, the glint of something so close to gold beneath.

Nothing in her girlish daydreams could ever have measured to this. She wants to run her fingers across the angle of his jaw and fade into the connection, to be enveloped in his heat, to lose everything she knows as her self and forget, forget, forget.

"Roy," she says, like a question. She cups his face in both hands, and he kisses her. She decides—for _once_, makes the choice, _for_ her self and not because it's an order or an obligation—she _decides_ that there is nothing else in the world, there is no war, nothing outside this tent and this moment and this connection.

"Riza," he says—not an answer, but the obvious conclusion of her thought. He breathes in, they breathe out, she gasps, and his heart hammers for both of them. This is _real—_when she closes her eyes, she will see only his face, dirty and imperfect and nothing else.

Keeping still any longer would require a superhuman level of control neither of them could ever hope to achieve. When he kisses her again, she closes her eyes and wraps her arms over his back and holds him close, moving with and against the push and pull, the pattern they establish together and break and then reform.

No words now: just sighs and moans between the kisses he feathers across her lips. Eyes open and eyes closed—she catches flashes of movement to match sensation and breathes him in. Release is nearing, but hardly her goal.

When it is over, when they are finished—when he lies exhausted beside her, his thumb running across her bottom lip, his is gaze distant and searching. She can read the apology waiting and kisses him to contain it. It's cold in his arms, but she won't leave.

In the morning, they stay silent. They separate, and they dress, and the sunlight seems to diminish them both. Wordlessly, she stretches out on the cot, arms crossed beneath her neck. She focuses on her shirt and jacket, folded together over a crate just to the left, held down by an open bag—the equal-armed cross stamped on its side is more brown than red.

"Here," Roy says, rough and rasped. "You'll want it."

He presses a small leather block to her lips.

"For the pain."

She half-expected another protest—she looks up at him sideways, and his eyes are dark, gaze cast aside from her. Obediently, she opens her mouth and bites down, her lips catching just the edge of his fingertips.

Eyes shut, she tries to steel herself, listening to the slide of fabric on skin, feeling the prickle of oxygen shifting over her back. Roy takes a sharp breath in. Riza's last thought, before the snap, is that she must not scream.


End file.
